The art of the cover version as stripped down reconstruction. In which stiff upper lip English public school takes on Atlanta GA’s funkiest and comes home with a surprising away point. 

In fact, the Flying Lizards were most famous for their 1979 chart hit cover of ‘Money (That’s What I Want)’, dismantled and then reassembled in similar robotic fashion to ‘Sex Machine’. But it’s the much less famous and far more difficult to find, James Brown cover that demonstrates the art of the Flying Lizards cover version at its best. 

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We encountered Caribou and their Rough-Trade-album-of-the year, ‘Swim’, earlier (see ABON 0120). ‘Swim’ is a wonderfully original mixture of thought-provoking ideas and left field dance rhythms. Written and performed by a genuine Dr of Mathematics, it - very appropriately you may think – sets out to prove that music can make you dance and think at the same time.

Whilst it’s not the first record to do that, ‘Swim’ doesn’t have many obvious historical reference points. In fact it doesn’t sound much like anything that has gone before.

Except of course for A Certain Ratio’s early Post-Punk icey Funk.

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By James Brown standards 1967 wasn’t a particularly prolific year – he only released five new albums and eleven singles.

But it was a critical year for the future of dance music because it was during 1967 that James evolved from leading R’n'B star with a side-line in funky singles to full-blown Funkateer No.1.

By 1967 James Brown had already been a leading R’n'B star for eleven years. He’d had hit after hit every year since his first in 1956. But in 1965, with ‘Papa’s Got A Brand New Bag’ he effectively invented Funk and created a whole new dimension to the James Brown phenomenon. He’d followed that up in 1966 by continuing to release his, by now regular handful of R’n'B hits. But he’d also begun to throw in the occasional Funk classic single just to show that ‘Papa’ wasn’t a one-off.

But it was in 1967 that the Funk thing really took off and became the centre of gravity of his output rather than an intermittent punctuation mark in his series of R’n'B classics. It was in 1967 that he finally got into the groove of releasing incredibly funky single after incredibly funky single in a series that continued at the same manically prolific pace and almost impossibly consistent level of brilliance until the mid ’70′s – creating almost single-handedly what would become the entire DNA of dance music for the next forty years.

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So we’ve reached ABON 0015 and nothing yet from the ’60′s. How’s that happened?

Think ’60′s and you think Flower Power, Summer of Love, Spector Wall of Sound, Beatles, Stones, Surf Bands, Soul and Funk and England having a World Class National Football Team. True but that only captures a fraction of the debris from the musical Big Bang that went off sometime in the early ’60′s.

Meet the American Garage Band of the mid ’60′s.

By 1966 America had been subjected to the British explosion of rock bands lead by The Beatles, The Stones,The Yardbirds, The Who, The Kinks et al for a couple of years. One of the consequences had been – for a significant proportion of American youth – an almost compulsive urge to be in a BAND. Any BAND.

The other had been a re-examination by these same proto-bandsters of the American Blues and Rock’n'Roll heritage that the Brits had plundered (and largely watered down) over the previous few years and the American mainstream had forgotten about.

The result was an explosion of Garage Bands. Bands who just seemed to come out of the woodwork, with an obsession for electric guitars and distortion, a knack of creating very modern but often fairly primitive takes on Rock’n'Roll or Blues and usually just one or sometimes two good ideas that turned into singles.

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